Scare of my life - Need to replace MB apparently


Recommended Posts

Hey folks. I just had the fright of my life while I was working. My office filled with a burning electrical smell and I couldn't pinpoint it so I unplugged everything and call the fire department. After they were here and determined nothing was on fire anywhere, we started plugging things back in and powering them up. The smell started coming from my UR server apparently. So it is now off and I need to get it back up and running as soon as I can.

 

I think I'm just going to build out a whole new server, case and all, but all the drives and SATA card will come over. How do I go about doing this so all the drives come up the way they're supposed to? Figure out which SATA port they're on and try to match that on the new board? Is that even possible?

 

And what about unRAID itself? Will it just work once plugged into the new MB or do I have to do something special? 

 

I'm still kind of freaking out over this episode. Phew.....

Edited by acurcione
Link to comment
Have you opened the case and pinpointed what got hot? Typically these kinds of incidents are cable or PSU related, not motherboard.


The fire folks had a thermal reader thing trying to find it. When it was on the only area going up in temp was a chip with a heat spreader on the motherboard. The longer it was on the hotter that got but everything else was much cooler.

It’s an older board so playing it safe I’m replacing the board, memory, CPU, case, and power supply. Adding in a GPU since I’m switching over to Ryzen 7.

I’m just glad after the smell got worse and worse I powered down and unplugged everything in my office. Which is a lot of crap! Had I not done that this could have been a lot worse. What a freaky morning this was.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro
Link to comment
On 11/7/2019 at 2:19 PM, jonathanm said:

Have you opened the case and pinpointed what got hot? Typically these kinds of incidents are cable or PSU related, not motherboard.

Well... It wasn't the power supply and wasn't necessarily the motherboard. Check the pics. The power connector to my cache drive MELTED. There are scorch marks on the bottom of the MB as well. My only hope now is that there was a recent backup of the app data directory and stored on the array. There should be. I can't remember how I have that configured.

 

What sucks here, I mean besides THIS, is that this was a very recently purchased and upgraded drive. Obviously toast now and the one thing I didn't order a replacement for. I hope like hell I can restore the data from a backup.

 

 

IMG_0022.thumb.jpg.040024e31a321604af5f3cb06f1dc8aa.jpgIMG_0021.thumb.jpg.79d584363c9d4d89a96830f19c2e4c4d.jpg

Link to comment

Could you take a picture of that area with the SSD removed? My suspicion is that the power supply connector came in contact with a raised portion of the motherboard mounting tray, and the reason it didn't immediately short out when the computer was assembled was that the raised area was painted or coated, and the normal vibration of running caused the coating to chafe off causing a direct short to ground by the 12V or 5V lead.

Link to comment
24 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Could you take a picture of that area with the SSD removed? My suspicion is that the power supply connector came in contact with a raised portion of the motherboard mounting tray, and the reason it didn't immediately short out when the computer was assembled was that the raised area was painted or coated, and the normal vibration of running caused the coating to chafe off causing a direct short to ground by the 12V or 5V lead.

That would make sense. Maybe when I swapped out the drive a few months back I wasn't careful enough. 

 

The power connecting point on the SSD is completely gone. I pulled everything I could salvage out of it and junked it. I don't much feel like taking the MB off so I can take the SSD off. That was always a PIA with this case. :)

Link to comment

Alright... I finally have a breathing machine again. Currently running Memtest for a bit. I haven't booted into unRAID yet, but I've gone through the BIOS and enabled/disabled a few things (like Virtualization items). Since this is the first time I've had to rebuild all the hardware I have a few questions.

 

1 - Should I create a new config, but keep drive assignments? Or is that not needed?

2 - Assuming my app data backup isn't fried (shouldn't be), copying that over to the new cache drive (once formatted) shouldn't present any issues correct? What about permissions?

3 - Any other gotchas I should look out for?

4 - Any AMD Ryzen/ASUS MB things I might want to do other than enabling virtualization?

 

Thanks all.

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.